George Berkeley

George Berkeley was an Irish clergyman and later bishop of Cloyne who, in his twenties, argued that matter does not exist: to be is to be perceived, and the world consists of ideas in minds, held in being by God. The Principles of Human Knowledge makes the case and the Three Dialogues make it readable. He spent three years in Rhode Island waiting for funds for a college in Bermuda that never came, wrote on tar-water as a cure for everything, and is the middle term between Locke and Hume in every history of British empiricism. Johnson refuted him by kicking a stone.